12/9/16

Greetings, colonists! This day, The Astronet brings us news of the most current exo-garments for you to create, and for the enhancement of our continued existence. All praise to the Mighty Engines!

Observe the trappings of our model, Fnu! Fnu is barely concealing her appropriate shame in this daring ensemble of perforated multiplicity! Fnu's immodest contrivance consists of a mammary-wrap, pelvic cradle, and shame cape, all of cunningly interwoven linearity fibers.

Each piece is optically transparent in the main, such that they provide negligible protection from alpha particles, as well as from the observation of male-designated appreciants, if you know what I mean! Attired in such things, Fnu will have her choice of partners at the Mate Selection Ritual, and all shall be eager to make their seed with her! Lucky Fnu! Thank The Leader!

Consternation and uproar! Let all in the Collective get a load of Glebda and Framulette in their matching linearity fiber coordinates! No, not galactic coordinates, silly! We have, of course, lost the knowing of galactic coordinate calculation, as the Flight Directive Journals were destroyed in the Wreckage of our Glorious Arrival. This is known. No, we mean to speak of cooridnated fashions!

Glebda is looking kicky in her pink tank and promiscuity skirt! The tank can be fitted with attachment points for a standard EVA helmet, so she can venture outside the arcology without missing a beat. So, she'll be a sensation at the moisture farms, as well as the Joint Ventilation and Filtration Committee Selection Panel Discussions!

Meanwhile, Framulette has chosen to add the thermal retention jacket to her yellow ensemble! All garments, again, are selectively transparent on a per-pixel basis for uncontrollable potential partner titillation! Shameful and delightful! Praise the Mighty Engines!

Astonishment! Is that The Lawgiver, come to view the fashion proceedings with us today? Wait! No! It is not the Lawgiver, but merely our model Zapua in her self-made authority smock, with a jaunty waist tie! Suddenly, this hideous Lawgiver charade is amusing to me, for her authority smock is linke unto that worn by the Lawgiver! Ha ha ha ha! Oh, that clever Zapua!

Zapua may very well be in radio contact with The Lawgiver, thanks to the high-fidelity earcups built into her hair arrangement. The earcups are receptive on the inter-dome security bands as well as the general use bands, and feature redundant I/O error correction, with total harmonic distortion of .004%. That's what I call hair with style! We'd better be careful what we say around Zapua! Ha ha! Thank The Lawgiver!

To become eligible for these fine garment units, see your object registrar and simply fill out the requisition form, and transmit your inquiry to Central Control via the next communications beam.

12/8/16

In 1959, purpose-built dragsters were kind of a new thing, and drag racing was very much a homegrown motorsport. Teams were experimenting with every aspect of the car's configuration, which is kind of fun to see in this 1959 article in Popular Mechanics. We now present the whole damn article.

Most conspicuously, these old dragsters placed the driver behind the engine, and often behind the rear wheels. As the article explains, this decision was made for reasons of weight distribution and traction. In later decades, this decision was un-made for reasons of not having red-hot exploding motor pieces shooting into your face, as was often the case, among other motivations. See? Safety!

You may recognize Mickey Thompson's name as a record holder with his twin-engine car, mentioned toward the end of the article. The company he would later form still makes tires and wheels for all types of motorsports. Neat!

Anyway, there's also a 1959 documentary on the "exciting new sport of drag racing" at the bottom of the post, too - Ingenuity in Action. It's got exact music you think of, when dreaming of doing a pass in the high tens in your home built drag car: a sort of Holiday for Strings type of thing that was the soundtrack for everything in The Fifties, no matter how badass or potentially lethal the activity. It's frikkin' adorable. Don't miss it.

12/7/16

12/5/16

Sanka is still is business, it seems. Why? Good question. Apart from trying to sell you a pointless product that wants you to be miserable, does this ad have anything to recommend it? Yup!

You know what happens when you get sleepy? You forget to put the "e" on the end of words, you monster! That's why Sanka misspells caffeine consistently throughout the copy here.

Does coffee mess with your sleep? It may, if you don't understand how it works. After ingesting caffeine, it reaches maximum levels (or "maximum happiness") in your bloodstream within an hour. After that, it'll take between three and six hours for you to come down.

So how much caffeine is in stuff? Everyone seems to use one cup of coffee as a benchmark, with about 120 milligrams of caffeine. Now, be careful. That's a cup of coffee, as in, you sitting in a restaurant and the server asks if you want coffee, maybe calls you "honey", and then brings you a thick ceramic cup that holds twelve ounces.

In the last twenty years or so, the actual coffee cup has become a bit of an anachronism, giving way to the "coffee stein" or the "coffee pail" that people carry around with them. If you call the twenty ounce bucket you get from Starbucks "a cup of coffee", go right ahead, but that's like two of the assumed standard servings, there, droopy.

A note on tea. "Herbal tea" is always caffeine free. In order to be actual, literal "tea", a drink must have the brewed leaves of camellia sinensis in it. There is only one kind of tea plant in all the wide world: camellia sinensis. The type of tea you wind up with is only determined by when the leaves are picked and how they are dried. To think that any hot drink with planty stuff in it is "tea" is a mistaken assumption. That's not tea. In the case of hot-plant-water, they have to call it "herbal tea" to avoid lying. If you want loads of details, go look on FaceTube for documentaries on tea. Modern Marvels has a complete episode on tea, and it's really interesting (Your mileage may vary.)

This Sanka ad claims that caffeine adds nothing to the flavor of coffee. Incorrect! If you've ever tried that weird caffeinated water brand, "Water Joe", you know that caffeine is bitter. Any sceintific article on caffeine's properties will tell you that. Are you going to accept the opinion of a company that can't even spell right?

Even though Sanka was preaching the gospel of grossness, the ad does offer something worthwhile. Taken out of context, the illustration of the lady pouring a gigantic cup of coffee is pretty neat. Nobody needs to know she's pouring herself a stupid cup of Sanka for jerks, do they? So, let's just take that out of context, shall we?

Click for 1600 px.

Boom. Context completely taken out of. You can keep her in your HDD's folder of clip art for a rainy day... or, this afternoon around three o' clock when you need a little help making it to quitting time. You're welcome!